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Ancient Viral Defense may Explain Susceptibility to HIV: Study
The virus is now extinct, but like most retroviruses, it inserts its DNA into the genome of organisms it infects, and it left its fingerprints all over the chimpanzee genome.
In fact, when the chimp genome was sequenced in 2005, it emerged that the largest difference between chimp and human DNA was the presence of PtERV1. Researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington, were intrigued by the disparity and speculated that the reason the virus had not left any markers in the human genome was because of an antiviral defense gene called TRIM5a.
"We know that PtERV1 infected chimps, gorillas and old world monkeys four million years ago but left no traces of having infected humans. Our theory is that this is because humans had this innate viral defense system," said Michael Emerman, a virologist at the center. To test their theory, Emerman and his team painstakingly reconstructed a small portion of the PtERV1 virus using DNA sequences from the chimp genome, and in laboratory experiments with human cells, matched it up with the human antiviral protein TRIM5a.
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